Traditionally, businesses and other organizations have stored their digital content, such as documents, files, and other digital information, on network file servers. Such file servers are typically located on-site behind a network firewall that prevents unauthorized network access to the content items stored on the file server. Content created by employees belongs to the business. On a file server, such content is centralized, allowing a business to easily segregate personal content items from content belonging to the business. That is, the business treats all items residing on the file server as business-owned content. Furthermore, this centralized view allows a business to easily manage the content. For example, the IT manager or administrator can set access control permissions on content stored on the company file server.
To work remotely, employees often store content items locally at their personal computers, personal accounts, and/or personal storage devices so that they can work with the content items offline or otherwise while not connected to the file server. This is less than ideal from the employer's perspective because the employer has less control over the locally stored content items when compared to the content items stored on the file server. This poses risk such as when, for example, the employee's personal computing device is lost, damaged, or stolen. Furthermore, the employer loses control of access of an offline copy outside of the file server.
A business may use a cloud-based content management service to “host” their content on servers operated by the service in addition to or instead of storing content on their own file servers. Cloud-based storage provides a number of benefits to businesses and their employees alike. One example of an online content management service is the “Dropbox” service provided by Dropbox, Inc. of Sa Francisco, Calif. The Dropbox service offers the ability to synchronize and share hosted content items among multiple devices and users. This flexibility, which stems for storing and synchronizing content both at end-user devices and on Dropbox, Inc. servers, supports a variety of different on-site and remote working arrangements.
With some existing cloud-based content management systems, the content storage model is less centralized than the traditional file server model. In particular, with these systems, each user of the system has their own individual synchronization repository on their personal computing device where content items synchronized with the system are stored. Further, each user maintains their individual synchronization repository independently of each other.
Some existing systems provide mechanisms to share selected content items between synchronization repositories. For example, with some existing systems, user Alice can share a folder in her synchronization repository with user Bob such that updates Bob makes to the shared folder in his synchronization repository are seen by Alice in her synchronization repository, and vice versa. However, with existing system, ownership of the shared folder is tied to an individual. This is problematic if Alice leaves the company and decommissions her synchronization repository or simply deletes the shared folder from her synchronization repository. In this case, the folder she shared with Bob may no longer be accessible to Bob. In the worst case, all of the work accumulated in the shared folder is lost.
Another problem with shared folders on existing systems is that hierarchical information pertaining to the shared folder may be lost when the shared folder is incorporated into another's synchronization repository. For example, assume Alice has a folder in her synchronization repository with the path/AB/C. With existing systems, if Alice shares folder /A/B/C with Chris, the folder appears as/C in Chris' synchronization repository with the hierarchical information about parent folders “A” and “B” lost. Thus, different hierarchical information may be available to different users with respect to the same resource, making it difficult to communicate about the exact location of the resource. Furthermore, additional sharing of the resource or parent resources is constrained. For example, a system may prevent Alice from sharing folder/AB with Bob after sharing folder/A/B/C with Chris.
Overall, existing cloud-based content management systems, due to the individualized and distributed nature of synchronization repositories, increase coordination costs for a business when used for managing and storing content items belonging to the business. Given the increasing amount of digital information generated by businesses, hosting of content items by businesses with cloud-based content management services can only be expected to increase. This trend is coupled with a desire of the businesses to retain a level of control over the content they host with such services and to provide more customizable permissions over such content. The present invention fulfills this and other needs.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.